Note: You can read the latest on Benji’s Paris #TwiTrip travels here.

In an interesting Guardian article posted yesterday, travel writer Benji Lanyado asks whether the recent adoption of Twitter as the micro-blogging site of choice among the celebrity elite, tech-geeks and marketing gurus could become the solo traveller’s best friend.

Twitter - Latest Tool to Revolutionise Online Travel?

Stephen Fry has been championing the usefulness of Twitter, claiming he is always using it while on his travels. Already ranking 3rd in Google search for the term ‘Blog‘, Stephen Fry is now one of Twitter’s most followed users (85,000 followers and counting).

And so, having researched the stories having broken via Twitter before even the local media knew anything about them (Denver runway plane crash and the Hudson river emergency landing), Benji - Twitter profile benjilanyado, announced how he planned to run an experiment. At some point in the not too distant future, the Guardian travel writer will be departing for Paris. Very little pre-planning is going into his travel schedule. In fact, the writer will be relying wholly on tweeted tips from his twitter following.

Interestingly, while road-testing the system, he asked yesterday whether anyone could suggest a ‘cool/cheap hotel for Paris next week. challenge mamashelter - its story of renovation posted here back in October 2008. Hotel Particulier De Montmartre was another hotel listed on Benji’s feed, along with hotel price comparison site hotelly and Oops Budget Hotel. The Paris camp site idea would perhaps end up buried under later tweets. A real stroke of genius came only two hours of the original hotel request tweet… Brillliant Tips posted a blog entitled ‘Travel via Twitter - Looking for a Cool Hotel in Paris?‘ aiming the post squarely at the travel writer.

Paris Boutique Hotel, mamashelter

I am looking forward to establishing if Benji’s plans to tour Paris, guided solely by user’s tweets will succeed. I am putting faith into this little endeavour and believe it will provide further evidence of Twitter’s emergence as the tool to revolutionise online travel.

I will be reporting back here regularly, updating you on Benji’s progress.

The east is rising again and there’s revolution in the air. Paris is reinventing itself, and visitors are now being encouraged out to a more working class, post-industrial landscape. With the tourist experience becoming more and more sanitised, the creators of the Mama Shelter hotel in the east of Paris are gambling on people’s desire for more authenticity.

The hotel was designed by Philippe Starck, and is the brainchild of the Trigano family (founders of Club Med) with the assistance, rather bizarrely, of a philosopher, Cyril Aouizerate. The Triganos also own the Fleche d’Or café, situated in a converted train station on the opposite side of the street, and are rapidly cornering the market in rough urban chic. The Fleche d’Or has long been the trailblazer for this part of Paris, and it hosts free concerts by up and coming international artists most nights of the week.

Mama Shelter Hotel

The Mama Shelter has risen from the ruins of a brutalist multi-story garage building and it dominates the disused Petite Ceinture railway line below. This line hasn’t been in operation since the 1930s, but the tracks remain in place and it provides a curious perspective from the hotel’s bar and restaurant. This vista is an essential part of the hotel’s marketing which would like us to see the establishment as a luxurious harbour in the heart of a new bohemia. Being a large structure (172 rooms), this is no boutique hotel, but with its sleek, discrete forms, this is perhaps the beginning of a new genre; loft hotels.

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